Biloxi: A Novel

by Mary Miller

Overview

Mary Miller seizes the mantle of southern literature with Biloxi, a tender, gritty tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take.

Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller transports readers to this delightfully wry, unapologetic corner of the south—Biloxi, Mississippi, home to sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr.

Louis has been forlorn since his wife of thirty-seven years left him, his father passed, and he impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. These days he watches reality television and tries to avoid his ex-wife and daughter, benefiting from the charity of his former brother-in-law, Frank, who religiously brings over his Chili’s leftovers and always stays for a beer.

Yet the past is no predictor of Louis’s future. On a routine trip to Walgreens to pick up his diabetes medication, he stops at a sign advertising free dogs and meets Harry Davidson, a man who claims to have more than a dozen canines on offer, but offers only one: an overweight mixed breed named Layla. Without any rational explanation, Louis feels compelled to take the dog home, and the two become inseparable. Louis, more than anyone, is dumbfounded to find himself in love—bursting into song with improvised jingles, exploring new locales, and reevaluating what he once considered the fixed horizons of his life.

With her “sociologist’s eye for the mundane and revealing” (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Miller populates the Gulf Coast with Ann Beattie-like characters. A strangely heartwarming tale of loneliness, masculinity, and the limitations of each, Biloxi confirms Miller’s position as one of our most gifted and perceptive writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631497841
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	492,549
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Mary Miller is the author of three previous books, including the story collection Always Happy Hour and the novel The Last Days of California. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

12/01/2018

His wife's gone, his father's dead, and he's quit his job in hopes of an inheritance check that's probably not in the mail, so sixtyish Louis McDonald Jr. just sits around watching reality TV. Then an impulsive stop at a house advertising free dogs introduces him to chubby mixed-breed Layla, and he's off to the dog park for a whole new life. From the author of stunners like The Last Days of California; with a seven-city regional tour.

Library Journal

★ 2019-02-17

This novel about a man and his dog is also about unexpected connections and the strange turns life can take.

One day, while driving to pick up his diabetes medicine and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi at his local Walgreens, Louis McDonald Jr., in a panic at having spotted his ex-wife's car, turns "left instead of right" and finds himself on an unfamiliar street, in front of a house with a sign out front advertising "FREE DOGS." Soon Louis is in possession of a companionable border collie. Harry Davidson, the man who gives Louis the dog, tells him the pooch is named Layla after the Eric Clapton song about George Harrison's wife, whom Clapton subsequently (briefly) married. The encounter, a harbinger of things to come, changes the trajectory of Louis' life, knocking it off its previous passive path. Having made one unpredictable decision, Louis, 63 years old, recently retired, and anticipating an inheritance following the death of his father, begins to make more of them—some of the more questionable choices stemming from an inexplicable preoccupation with Harry Davidson's wife. Louis' post-marital life heretofore had been one primarily of solitude and inaction—stretches of watching TV in his chair, sipping beer, punctuated by visits from his "dull and fine" brother-in-law bearing leftover restaurant meals—but as he begins to take actions, both admirable and ill-advised, he starts to connect with those around him, set new patterns, and, ultimately, chart a new path into his future. Writing with insight and wit, Miller (Always Happy Hour, 2017, etc.) is both unsparing and sympathetic as she captures the perspective of a character who, initially at least, comes off as not terribly appealing. But at a slow, deliberate pace befitting the story's Southern setting, she reveals Louis to be something more than the emotionally limited sad sack he may initially be taken for—an irascible old coot, sure, but a lovable one you can't help but root for.

Miller's deliciously engaging, gently quirky, surprisingly hopeful novel seals her spot in the pantheon of Southern fiction writers.

Kirkus Reviews